(2 of 2)
Technology, an ambitious but not very successful attempt to get industry to underwrite art experiments) to such projects as royalty legislation for artists on resale of their work (TIME ESSAY, March 11) and Change, Inc., a foundation through which established artists can give emergency money to unrecognized ones by donating works of art to a pool. In the desiccated, clique-ridden and ungenerous atmosphere of the New York art world in the '70s, Rauschenberg has turned out to be one of the few senior artists with real respect and concern for his juniors.
All during this time — ten years —there was a slow gathering of opinion that Rauschenberg's art was on the decline. Like Willem de Kooning, he be came one of those major figures whose last show is always fated to be thought his worst. The reason was that no later performance could ever measure up to the exaggerations of praise cast on their early work. Meantime, Rauschenberg, mainly through his collaborations with the Los Angeles printmaking firm of Gemini G.E.L., had developed into one of the few major graphic artists in Amer ica. The print suited his liking for swift assemblies of images, and his rest less improvisation tested the limits of defining a print. The latest result includes some of the most remark able graphic images made by a liv ing artist: Rausehenberg's Hoar frost suite, including Mule (see color page).
Taffeta Phantom. They are out of the familiar Rauschenberg image bank again, part random and part (one suspects) autobiographical: newspaper fragments, comic cutouts, a Cessna, a balloon, an octopus, buckets, a hand gripping a squeegee, an ostrich egg and so on.
But they are printed on floating veils of silk, chiffon, muslin and taffeta, one positioned over another.
One peers into this soft, gauzy space as though looking through ice crystals diffused on a windowpane: hence the collective title Hoarfrost.
No reproduction can convey the subtleties of light and opacity Rauschenberg's method gives. The mix of forms is pale, apparitional and exquisite. This seems a long way from the declamatory harshness of his old combine paintings, but in fact, it pertains to a continuous theme of Rauschenberg's: ghost images, traces. The white paintings were made white to accept passing shadows. The De Kooning drawing was not erased to blank: a phantom of it stays on the paper. Rauschenberg's illustrations to Dante's Infer no (1960) were pale transfers from newsprint. But the Hoarfrost prints extend Rauschenberg's delight in faintness to a ravishing lyricism: because their constituent images are so familiar, clear-cut and even brassy, and yet presented with such rippling and indistinct sweetness, they become a visual equivalent of free-associative dreaming — creative inattention at play. Perhaps only a temperament as rich and unclogged by dogma as Rauschenberg's could have brought off this theatrical play between the "reality" of collage and the vague beauties of atmosphere — or having done that, turned it into such a wry disquisition on the difficulty of seeing anything Clearly at all.